Flick of The Day: Scarface (1983)

"Say Hello to my little friend...", so ends one of the most overblown and hyper violent gangster epics ever to hit the silver screen. A film that was largely derided or worse still ignored by critics upon its release in 1983, criticising it for its violence and supposed glamorisation of the drugs trade, something that was very much a no-no in the Reagan '80s.

Scarface (Widescreen Two-Disc Anniversary Edition)

This film, scripted by Oliver Stone and directed by Brian De Palma bears little resemblance to the original 1932 version directed by Howard Hawks apart from the fact that both films would prove controversial upon release. After being rejected by censors in 1931, Hawks was forced to add an alternate ending where the gangster hands himself over to the police as opposed to going down in a hail of bullets and the subtitle "The Shame of The Nation" added. De Palma's version would prove equally controversial with a number of the most violent scenes removed  to give the film an R rating in the United States as opposed to the dreaded X rating.

For the uninitiated, this is your classic tale of rise and fall. Al Pacino is Tony Montana, a Cuban immigrant who goes straight from Castro's jails to the streets of Miami. Quickly rising from the streets to the drug trade, he eventually usurps his boss, Frank Lopez played by the excellently over the top Robert Loggia, to become top dog.  Of course before long, it all ends in tears. That's the interesting part though.

This is very much Al Pacino's film though. He drives it from beginning to end in a stunning performance as an almost personification of evil. He would go on later in his career to play the devil himself in The Devils Advocate but this the scarier performance. Throughout the film, his character keeps everyone including the audience on edge, as you know he could snap into violence at any moment.

Scarface (Universal Cinema Classics)

The film is over long, coming in at an ass numbing 170 minutes and at times the violence is excessive, though not gratuitous. Excessive in the sense that you gradually become desensitised to it, its loses its shock effect as the film drags on, though the chainsaw in the bathroom scene early in the film still retains that shock effect nearly 30 years after its release. I don't feel the violence is gratuitous in that it is necessary to remain true to a realistic portrayal of the excesses and violence of the drugs trade in the 1980s. However for its flaws, this remains a modern classic, which as a cinephile you have to see if only for the spectacle and Pacino's grand standing performance. This is epic film-making of the highest order.